Tourism Higher Education From Perspective Of Champ

With 30 years of reform and opening up. China's tourism industry has become one of the fastest growing industries in the national economy, and has made remarkable achievements. Tourism education aiming at training and cultivating tourism talents has also significantly developed in terms of both the scope as well as numbers of the institutions that focused on tourism education. However, these accomplishments in tourism education have also been associated with contradictions and problems. The tourism education system had evolved from the initial scale expansion to quantity enhancement and currently to the painful birth of a mature and comprehensive system. Some tourism colleges and universities have suffered from programme elimination and scale reduction. A reoccurring problem in the tourism higher education has been the widening gap between the supply of and demand for high quality tourism education. This problem is a serious threat to the survival of the tourism education, and restricts the future development of China's tourism education! Another important issue in China's tourism education is to do with the subject status. The low status of tourism has severely restricted the development of the tourism education in China. With the rapid growth of the tourism industry, the emergence of the knowledge economy & information era, and the intensified influence of globalization, the demand for high level tourism talents has been increasing over time. Such questions as whether China's tourism higher education can meet the need of the rapid development and international competition in tourism; and whether tourism graduates can adapt to the society's future development are worthy of our attention and study. This thesis is in this context carries out an in-depth investigation in tourism higher education in China. The research findings should have important practical implications.From the perspective of the Bourdieu Champ, this study seeks to answer the following questions based on the analysis of tourism education practice in China:"The current tourism higher education has many problems and what are the causes of these problems? What can the tourism education institutions do in order to solve these problem?" I have experienced China's tourism education system as an undergraduate, master and doctorate student and am also currently engaged in teaching at a tourism college. I do hope this study could offer possible solutions to the problems faced by the tourism higher education in China. Although a great progress has been made over the past three decades. there is still lack of in-depth research with sound theoretical underpinnings. This thesis is therefore a first attempt in carrying out a systematic study that examines the higher tourism education in China using the qualitative approach, which puts the tourism education phenomenon in the educational sociology context.Champ theory reveals the process and characteristics of the power reproduction and capital reproduction in the field of schools via symbolization of the state ideology and individual habitus. Based on a case study, this thesis vividly analyzes structure and operation mechanism of"undergraduate tourism education Champ", especially it does a detailed analysis on habitus characteristics and their interactive logic among six actors (education departments of government, administrative departments of colleges, faculty, students, parents, and the industry). The description of two people's life story, however, serves as metaphor of the education Champ power, operation logic, and culture, at the individual actor level. Chapter Five analyzes W tourism college's three stages of capital structure evolution, pointed out that this college's operation was a classical tourism college-department mode, and the student training still adhered to the traditional "scholasticism" mode of teaching. Records from the interview with a tourism teacher--Teacher Gu, intuitively reflect the faculty's perception of W tourism college. At the end of the chapter, it pointed out that the operation mode of W tourism college Champ, which belongs to the college dominant education Champ. Meanwhile, it uses Champ-Capital theory to explain the reason why the W tourism college finally failed.This study further reveals the fundamental problem that prevents tourism higher education in China from appropriate development. That is, the independency of the tourism programme has not been established in the higher education discipline system in China. Thus, the first issue for tourism higher education is the subject development, and improvement of the tourism subject status. This thesis answers the questions (what and how tourism schools should do) from two aspects:the tourism school's operational mode and student training mode. That is, the independent school system within a university is the best choice as the mode of tourism school operation; and the student training should be done through a joint partnership between school and the industry. Establishing the right education system could resolve the problem of miss-match between the supply of and demand for tourism graduates, and improve the quality of tourism education in China.Not only is the issue of "China tourism higher education" a big but also a challenging topic. However, studying this topic is fulfilling. There are three innovations in this study. First, the study is theoretical innovative, as this is the first attempt in linking the Champ theory with tourism education research Secondly, the study is methodological innovative, as it uses the education sociology research method together with other research methods, such as comparison method, process-event analysis method, and life story-telling in the data collection and analysis. The study complements the other published studies and greatly enriches tourism education research. Thirdly, this research is also innovative in terms of its perspective to research, as the education Champ can shed important light in observing, understanding and categorizing the education activities and phenomenon. Particularly, the capital-power analysis from the Champ theory is very powerful in describing, analyzing and explaining education issues.The Bourdieu Champ theory is presented against the backdrop of the western society. The cases described in his study therefore might also be colored by the western way of thinking. The tourism school education Champ proposed in this study is hard to avoid the possibility of putting the cart before the horse in terms of theory construction. Qualitative research inevitably, however, implies subjective, and it requires researchers to have higher level of writing and thinking ability, which is very challenging for me. Because of my limited ability in expressing my thinking in a comprehensive manner, the thesis may inevitable suffers from defects. Nevertheless, the study truly reflects my view of points and the experience of the participants in tourism higher education. Therefore, it provides innovative and compiling comments, which may be useful for the future development of China's Tourism higher education.